Julie Zhuo: belief

Transcript context

…My pleasure. I really appreciate that. So the reason we are chatting again three years later is you're re-releasing your incredible book, The Making of a Manager. I've got it right here. You've sold a bazillion copies. It's been on every list I've seen. You're releasing the paperback version. You're adding some chapters. I guess, first of all, just how do you feel on reflecting back on the success of this book? It honestly went beyond my expectations, so I'm super happy with it. My big motivation to write it was, I think, largely because I felt if I had to write this thing, I was likely going to become a better manager. And that was actually a huge part of it. Because thinking about and writing something, I've been blogging for a long time, and I know that part of my process is... when I really sit down to try and put down everything I feel and write letters to myself, it really helps me. And so that was honestly a huge motivation. I hope that it would go out there and it would sell some books. I was thinking about that maybe for people who grew up in companies like mine, like Facebook, high scale, Silicon Valley, it might resonate. I couldn't have expected that it would have much wider reach than that. And that's been really awesome. And just how many people will tell me things like, I thought I was the only one who felt this way, but this book made me realize that, hey, these are very normal feelings. And that's certainly how I felt just stumbling through and feeling like an imposter for so many years. And so it really is very gratifying to hear that from readers. I feel like it's the modern day high output management. That's the book that's been mentioned most on this podcast. And it feels like this is just like a modern version. I feel like that book is actually out of date in a lot of ways. So I can see why people are really drawn to it. And this is a great segue to the first area I want to spend some time on, which is it feels like a lot of the skills you learn as a manager translate to being really good with AI and using AI tools really well. And I want to talk through a few trends that I want to get your take on that relate to this general theme. The first is it feels like just everyone is going to become a manager in the near future because of agents being so integrated into our workflows. There's this agentic society that we're that we're coming to. And it feels like the same skills of being a manager make you really good working with agents. Just thoughts on that and where you think that's going to go.…

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